Abstract

Friday, May 19, 2017

Gender gap

When I
first started writing about Alzheimer’s, I already knew that women were more
likely to develop the disease than men. This seemed commonsensical, since women
tend to live longer—about six years longer, on average. The point was driven
home by Maria Shriver during the national meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association
national meeting in March in Washington, who made clear that 65 percent of
people with Alzheimer’s are women. Shriver’s father, Sargent Shriver, a
prominent figure in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who lived past 90,
was somewhat of an outlier. Maria Shriver cared for her dad through the
culmination of his long life.

In a May 10 article for the health and medical news
service “STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine,” reporter
Roberta Diaz Brinton commented, “While caregiving for loved ones with dementia
can certainly be meaningful, dispiriting routines such as toileting,
undergarment-changing and bathing are enduring challenges. Lack of daily
predictability in dementia-linked symptoms intensifies the burden.” Not surprisingly,
women are typically the primary caregiver for the person’s loved one, and the
stress of providing the care can take a toll on the caregiver.

Diaz Brinton was not the only writer to highlight absenteeism
recently. Another article about the disproportionate role of women as
caregivers appeared this week in theJournal of the American Medical Association
[JAMA]. Written by Nicholas T. Bott and two other researchers, the writers point
out that women provide roughly two-thirds of all elder care.

The statistics are stark. Daughters are 28 percent more
likely to be caregivers than sons. As theJAMA article notes dryly, “The best long-term care insurance in our
country is a conscientious daughter.” Eighty-three percent of caregiving comes
from family members. As a result,caregivers
often feel dispirited, if not downright exhausted. And with a new administration
in place, federal funding for caregivers are likely to be a low priority, at
best. One novel approach developed by the Obama administration would enable Medicare
Part E to allow seniors to “trade reduced acute inpatient for new long-term
care.” It’s an intriguing idea. But with the Trump administration in a state of
siege these days, it’s hard to imagine the Medicare Part E plan coming to
fruition.